Mac shop spends night printing Seahawk shirts

While Seattle Seahawks fans were reveling in Sunday night’s Super Bowl XLVIII victory, the staff at Textile Graphics in McMinnville was working through the night screen-printing 900-dozen championship shirts in preparation for Monday sales.

“It’s the most number of shirts we’ve ever printed over a short period of time,” said Company President Jeff Chapman. He said 15 employees plunged into the job at 7:30 p.m. and were still going strong at 7:30 a.m.

They boxed the shirts for shipping to a Seattle distribution hub. The first truck pulled out halfway through the printing process. A second truck headed north later with the rest.

The client was VF Imagewear of Tampa, Fla., represented by Operations Manager Chris Galvis. It is a subsidiary of the VF Corporation, owner of such iconic brands as Lee, Wrangler and North Face, which bills itself as the world’s largest apparel company.

Galvis said VF dispatched two shipments of shirts for possible screen printing, one to Textile Graphics and the other to a vendor in Denver, which will be returning its supply. Textile received a long-sleeved blue version, to which it was asked to affix an NFL-approved Seahawks logo.

Knowing VF would be looking for a Northwest printer, once Seattle won the NFC title game, Chapman put in a bid. And he succeeded in landing the job.

“It worked out pretty well for me, and for them,” he said.

“This event only happens once a year,” Galvis said. “Our job is to look for contractors.”

He said the company repeats the drill for all major sports, so is continually lining up vendors capable of serving major cities.

This being the first Super Bowl championship for the Seahawks, and the first professional sports championship for a Seattle team in more than 30 years, demand is expected to run very high. Galvis said he is also contracting with other vendors around the region in an attempt to meet it.

“It’s a slow time of year for us,” Chapman said, so Textile was well-positioned to pitch in. Still, the office and sales staff had to be pressed into service to help the screenprinting team get that many shirts processed in time.

“It took everything we could to get everything done,” he said. “You’re really against a clock to get them done as fast as possible.”

With the exception of a couple of short breaks and a middle-of-the-night lunch, the team worked nonstop. And members still had smiles on their faces as the sun rose in the morning.

Office manager Amy Hoff was getting her first experience at shrink-wrapping boxes full of shirts. Sandra Paola was charged with applying NFL stickers on the finished product — a league requirement.

Chapman said the company landed a contract to print NCAA national football championship shirts for the Oregon Ducks in 2010, but they lost to the Auburn Tigers in the title game. He said it printed conference championship T-shirts for the Portland Trail Blazers the year they went on to face the Detroit Pistons in a losing effort in the finals.